


Strange Things are Afoot in Cradle Bay

by god_is_undead



Category: Cowboy Bebop, Disturbing Behaviour (1998), Multiple Fandoms Incoming, No seriously eventually this is going to go balls-out insane, eventually - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, Drug Dealing, F/F, F/M, I'm Bad At Tagging, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Lin Has No Chill, M/M, Multiple Crossovers, Multiple Universes Colliding, Nothing good ever happens, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, POV Original Female Character, Recreational Drug Use, Seriously theres a lot of illegal shit going on in here, Shin needs a hug, Slice of Life, Slow Build, This story is very much about their individual responses to the situation, Vicious is Not Nice, and therefore doesnt look much like a normal take on this i guess, but mostly to things like Goodfellas and The Rolling Stones, frequently but not permanently, multiple pop culture references, obscure movies incoming, the OC tries not to be a bitch and often fails
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-04-26 09:27:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14399190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/god_is_undead/pseuds/god_is_undead
Summary: Stuck outside their own time and space, four people have to navigate the United States in the late 20th century, while dealing with problems in their environment, and between each other. Basically, a really weird slice of life story involving the age-old trope of dimensional fuckery.Turns out, when you yank the rug out from underneath people, that affects them. Who knew?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sweet titty-fucking Christ, I have a new fucking rule for myself: NO FANFICTION WHILE ON A DEPRESSIVE BENDER. Shit gets really goddamn weird. I had to take a big break, this semester almost killed me. I am still working on everything else, but the last two months have been a special kind of hell. About the only good thing is that I have a neat paper that I have an interesting research proposal to write about art and psychology.
> 
> I SWEAR TO GOD I AM WORKING ON THINGS STILL. ALL OF THEM. I JUST WORK SLOWLY AND START MORE PROJECTS THAN I PROBABLY SHOULD.
> 
> There are some important things to note about this story. Some of it I feel I shouldn't have to say, but on the off-chance somebody waltzes in here and accuses me of promoting drug use...
> 
> 1\. Just because like 3/4th of the characters are criminals and *gasp* do criminal things doesn't mean I approve of the things they do. But we're not going to play cute games like "oh they're just too good a person to get into that stuff." That's insipid. Druggies are addicts, not existentially evil, and most of them do drugs for a reason, not because they're a bad person. Frankly, I don't understand the Bebop fandom's insistence that neither Spike nor Julia could possibly have been using Red Eye, and it had to have been only Vicious. Drugs are inanimate objects and don't confer or take away from morality. I'd certainly accept a thematic explanation--the presence of the drugs and Vicious' deals with them weighing heavily on them even in his absence, but it in no way categorically rules out the possibility that one or both of them had at some point done Red Eye. For fuck's sake, I feel like doing drugs is relatively less harmful than some of the other things gangsters get up to. It's not exactly massacring your enemies. You only fuck yourself up, doing drugs.
> 
> 2\. When I tell you that this is slice of life mixed with multiple crossover mixed with a lot of people who really really really need therapy, please believe me.
> 
> 3\. There is an overarching plot, but we'll take a while to get there. Why? Because god knows I can't do overwhelmingly large Meereenese Knots right now.

The only orderly thing in the living room was a small white pile with strips sectioned off on the small oval mirror someone had taken down from the front hall and placed on the coffee table. It was surrounded by a storm of beer bottles and shredded, discarded food wrappings. Sitting next to the pile was a small laminate rectangle, which Kitty recognized: the library card she had since had replaced.

 _So that’s where that got to. Charming_.

She passed through the wreckage and into the kitchen, which wasn’t in any better condition. _My roommates are such_ assholes. It smelled like weed and vomit and cheap beer, an increasing constant after the last five months, and the sink was full of dishes.

 _We are_ never _getting the security deposit back_. Well, unless they try and go full Goodfellas on the landlord…

Which was entirely within the realm of possibility.

It probably wouldn’t go like how they expected, that was for sure, but she had almost no voice as far as they were concerned. There was at least a decent chance they would try, in any case. _Never mind that I’m the only one from this fucking planet, this country, or—let’s just go_ all _the way here—from a relatively stable period in history. When I tell them the cops aren’t nearly as corrupt here as they are on Mars, it would be nice if I were to get something other than a blank stare like I'm an idiot_.

Well, that was overstating things a bit, but the point was…

 _Oh, fuck it_. Bitching inside her head wasn’t helpful. _But it makes me feel better_.

She heaved the bags onto the counter top, displacing some empty takeout boxes until a couple fell to the floor. Kitty left them where they were until after she had put away the groceries and started a pot of coffee, and then retrieved a trash bag from underneath the sink, muttering.

Kitty tried not to be scornful, but she couldn’t help it. It took real effort to bite her tongue for a house full of criminals, and about the only thing that stopped her was that they would literally kill her if she made trouble.

So that was nice.

But did they have to do drugs _in the fucking house?_ Around her? Really? Didn’t people have like…crackhouses for that kind of shit?

 _Are you kidding; this_ is _the fucking crackhouse_. She doubted they had sent invitations out to the local junkies, but somehow, word had got around, and now…

She filled one bag full of trash and moved on to a second; in cleaning up the table area she found a crushed pack of Marlboros with three bent cigarettes left underneath a couple of empty beer cans. Kitty didn’t smoke often, but she felt like she deserved one. The mild high from the chemicals would help her out a little, or at the very least be a distraction, and lift her out of this funk. There were a couple unopened Coors in a box, and she opened one of those, too.

It wasn’t until she had more or less straightened up the kitchen—except for the sink, that was a never-ending war of attrition waged with all the tenaciousness they could muster on both sides—and moved into the living room that there was wormsign. She didn’t turn around to look to see who it was; either it was someone she knew, or someone she didn’t. She didn’t know which was worse, or which she preferred.

“You don’t have to do that…”

“I don’t mind,” she said to Shin, a bit snappishly, as she got on her knees to reach under the table. _My knees thank you for their abuse, sir, may they have another?_ She knew her tone very much screamed _I do mind, fuck you, by the way_ , but she was hard-pressed to care. She could hear him walk up behind her.

He sounded almost sheepish. “No, really, you don’t need to do that—”

“No, really—it needs to get done.” _And none of you chucklefucks are likely to do it before Doomsday_. At first she had left it alone, only to find a steadily accumulating film of wreckage begin to fill the house. Elena was by no means a clean-freak, but she didn't want to have to kick empty food wrappings around to walk on the carpet.

Shin walked around to the other side of the table, bent down, and started to gather trash up with her, until he froze. “Are you smoking?”

“Yep,” Kitty muttered, cigarette tucked into one side of her mouth. She didn’t look up at him.

“I’ve never seen you smoke.”

Kitty sat up to grab an empty can and flick ashes into it, then shot him a skeptical glance with one eyebrow cocked. _That's what you're worried about?_ She stuffed the can into the trash bag.

“I’m not touching the drugs. I like my hands attached.” She reached over and took a drink of the Coors, with a grimace, and set it down. Not only was it disgusting to start with, it was almost warm. “I’m finally scant hours from Seattle, and we end up a decade before microbreweries really hit the scene. God is really hunting me for sport. Fucking asshole.”

“You’re _drinking?_ ” He sounded positively scandalized.

“When did I say I never drink,” she said, acidly. “Or never smoke?”

“Well I’ve just never seen you do either one. You’re never around when…”

 _When you have people over? I'm not a fucking ascetic, I just don’t like junkies or shitty alcohol. And when I don’t like two things, they don’t cancel each other out when put together. What a mystery this is_.

When she was ten years younger, in college, it had been dollar shots of well vodka on Thirsty Thursdays, the memory of which being the only thing that made the swill in front of her palatable, but that had passed into the sunset of history, accompanied by a callow tolerance for a hangover.  Now, back home, she had a fridge full of good single malt scotch and dry red wine, and no particular desire to not remember every sip, which she did with a quiet, intimate, limited number of people.

But explaining even a word of that was pointless.

“I hope it’s everything you dreamed of.”

"You _are_ welcome, to, you know...come downstairs when..."

Shin was the only one who was likely to verbally extend any such invitation, and maybe the other two would have allowed it if she had just come downstairs and inserted herself into the fray without a word, but as she refused to acknowledge his words, he trailed off.

“Kitty…”

She had started to bend back over but paused, and looked at him to find him sitting on his heels and staring at her. “Yes?”

“Are you alright?”

The flare of anger was more instinctual than anything, set off by his concern and her anger because _clearly_ , if he actually gave a shit, she wouldn’t be being put in the position of cleaning up after them in the first place, now would she? Not when she couldn't do anything about it except stand there and take it. If Vicious put his foot down, she had no choice, and he had no intention of doing her any favors.

“What do you mean? I’m not the one staying up all night doing coke until I forget where I am.”

Shin froze. Shock, then pain flooded his wide green eyes. A moment later it was all overcome by anger and he quickly pushed himself to his feet, dropping everything he had picked up, and walked away from the coffee table.

Kitty shut her eyes and sighed internally. She had had a smart mouth all her life, but not only was that one just plain cruel, she really needed to put a lid on it. She might get away with that with him, but Lin would take exception to say nothing of how Vicious would react, and allowing herself to get into the habit of smart remarks was a good way to end up in a bad way.

“ _Shin_ ,” she called out, twisting around and standing up. “Hey. Wait.”

Shin stopped and turned around reluctantly, in the doorway just before the stairs. He was young—she forgot so often that she was technically the oldest person in this house, older even than Vicious by a couple of years (then _act like it_ )—and there was something pale and hollow in his face, something that hadn’t been missing on Mars.

This whole experience had taken a bite out of him, hadn’t it?

“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

It had taken a bite out of all of them, left them all adrift and floundering in a completely strange environment. Just because Kitty dealt with it by burying herself in books about theoretical physics she _really_ didn’t understand, writing letters to researchers, trying so hard to find some kind of scientific explanation for all this as if somehow drowning herself meant not that there wasn’t an answer, but that she _didn’t understand_ the answer, didn’t mean that they were less for dealing with it in a different way. It didn’t excuse the fact that if they got caught they were all headed for jail, but she wasn’t such a monster that she couldn’t empathize with the fact that this wasn’t even normal behavior for Mars. It reminded her of Jesse Pinkman’s reaction after killing the nerdy guy. Glen? Gale?

Not that she had seen it firsthand as yet, and she didn’t want to. She was luckier than them all; she at least knew her surroundings well enough to be on some sort of solid ground. For them, Earth was a dry dustball, pulverized day and night by fragments of the moon, which they now saw hanging silver and pregnant over their heads, waxing and waning. She had no idea how they felt about that. She had never asked. It had never occurred to her.

Shin stared at her, shifted a little, and crossed his arms, waiting. He didn’t smile. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I was out of line.”

He let out a sigh, his face twitched somehow in a kind of grimace she had a hard time interpreting, but he gravitated back towards her.

“You shouldn’t have to clean all this up yourself,” he said.

“Coffee should be ready by now,” she said.

Shin seemed to wilt a little, but rather than push the issue he went into the kitchen to get coffee. When he came back, she had everything but the mirror straightened up and stuffed away.

“That was quick,” he said. “I’ll take the bags out to the bin—”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll do it.”

“You can’t do everything."

“I’m here, I’m thinking about it. I’ll do it.”

“Kitty…”

“I want to.” _Maybe this is just how_ I _cope_. By drowning herself. By grasping on to small, meaningless details. Anything that she could actually have an effect on.

Shin looked wounded, for some reason.

“Well okay, then…”

“Should I make breakfast?” Kitty asked. “Anyone _else_ I should expect? I didn’t see anyone naked in a tree this morning, but that doesn’t mean anything.” It was rare, but it happened. And sometimes she even liked the people that stayed over; one guy had gone on a long and hazy rant about how the West was about to decline, but it couldn’t see it yet, while half falling asleep into his orange juice. It was almost eerie just how good his predictions were. She kind of wished that guy would reappear.

“No, it…it was a quiet night.” He laughed faintly, an attempt at a smile on his face that vanished immediately when he saw Kitty wasn’t smiling back.

Kitty hauled the two bags outside to the bin at the end of the driveway, a walk of about a quarter mile to the side of a small two-lane road, on gravel. By the time she returned, Shin was poking at something in a saucepan on the stove. She came over to see.

“Have you had anything to eat yet?” he asked.

“I had some McDonalds from the drive-thru on my way back.” Mulan had just been released, so the limited run of Szechuan sauce was underway. Only a massive circle-jerk surrounding a show that convinced its watchers that they were smart for liking it in some way could have resurrected such a prosaic condiment and inspired such rabid consumption. It pretty much fell in line with her theories on how otherwise off-putting bits of animals became delicacies: convince a person that they're cultured for eating it and you can make a lot of money.

Now that she thought about it...she liked _Rick and Morty_ , too, and maybe under the circumstances it was tempting fate, but—she almost wished she would end up in that world. If she survived the experience, Rick Sanchez could probably fix all her shit. “I’m going upstairs. Don’t burn the house down.”

“You don’t want anything?”

“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”

She disappeared again, vanishing out of the conversation, out of the confrontation, out of the condition, as she walked up a set of steps that wouldn’t have been out of place at home, though a bit dated. By the time she made it to the top, she realized she had forgotten to get herself some coffee, and that was upsetting, because downstairs was Shin, and she didn’t want to talk to or look at Shin again for a while.

She unlocked her door and slipped inside, grateful to have made it back, then was careful to lock the door behind herself once she was in. It wouldn’t stop any of them if they really wanted to get inside, but there was something psychologically reassuring about a locked door and the safe, protective enclosure of four walls.

Her room was plain. She liked it like that. Sterilized of any particular association with a decade, she could _pretend_. Kitty turned on the light and eased herself into the chair by the window. A stack of library books sat waiting for her, and she reached for the one on top: _Pride and Prejudice_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *sighs*
> 
> i swear i haven't forgotten all my other projects

It felt something like going from a later season all the way back to the first in a show like Game of Thrones.

Kitty had been in fourth or fifth grade in 1998. One of the two; it was a bit hard to remember now. Ten or eleven years old. Things were the largely same, and yet _different_ enough to get under her skin in strange ways that made it truly difficult for her to pin down. Maybe most of it was just the difference between being a young child steeped in upper-middle-class affluence, and being an adult a lot closer to the fringe.

For Kitty, at the very least, this experience validated much of the less complimentary literature she had read if not personally experienced. In spite of her parent’s endless whining about Clintons in the White House at the time, she didn’t personally remember the 1990’s as being any less idyllic than the Baby Boomers remembered the 1950’s. Neither was fair to reality. _Bias is a hell of a drug_.

There were things totally indigenous to this _place_ , too.

_I can’t believe I didn’t notice this before_. The realization wasn’t pleasant, but then, the name Cradle Bay had been bothering her for months now.

It wasn’t like she was from this part of the country, though. She had lived in all the other corners of the country, but Puget Sound? Washington state? The Northwest in general? She had never set foot up here before in her life. _This is what I get for taking advantage of the opportunity._

Kitty could feel their eyes on her, making absolutely no attempt to hide their scrutiny, or the barely veiled threat conveyed by such excessive and focused attention. It could also have been that they were nothing but a poorly contrived abomination, a crime against humanity masquerading as the hot new quick fix in child psychology that wasn’t pharmacological, as opposed to any great late-20th-century conspiracy to fuck with her head, but…

Kitty glanced over her shoulder, checking in the mirrored surface to her left; they were _still_ staring, clustered in a group of five wearing their blue letter jackets, and standing by some familiar snacks with vaguely familiar labels. Their eyes were intent, focused. Locked on target. She looked away again, quickly, aware that that in and of itself betrayed how nervous she was. _They’re high schoolers, for Christ’s sake. You literally live with people who are way scarier than_ that _. Get a grip_.

But confrontation, especially with Stepford Kids whom the local cops would protect, even to the point of covering up murder (which, you know: first scene and all), didn’t sound like a great idea. There were five of them in the gas station, two of them taller, bigger, and all of them at least ten years younger and springier than Kitty. She might have looked young in the face, but that was just the moisturizer and sun screen.

_Out of all the bullshit tiny towns in America, or hell, the wide, wide world, out of all the universes, we had to come to this one_. To late-90’s B-movie purgatory with teenage Teddy Flood and ex-Mrs. Cruise.

Kitty was beginning to think there was some asshole orchestrating all of this whose game she didn’t fully understand, some piece of shit fanfiction writer in yet another universe (she hoped they got papercuts on a regular basis and stepped on a lot of LEGOs…like, _a lot_ of LEGOs), but as hard as she tried to avoid entanglements, she kept finding them. Whether that meant sprinting her ass away from a gang war so she wouldn’t get shot or sprinting her ass away from god knows what else, she kept landing face first in the shit. _I just hope the next world isn’t Westeros. With my luck I’ll be sprinting my ass away from a dragon_.

Without glancing at her observers, she pivoted on her heel and went up to the cashier, who was a grandfatherly old man. He smiled at her.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hi. How are you?”

“Oh, just fine, just fine,” he said, and rang up the Josta (she _definitely_ didn’t remember Josta, but it was there to buy, and the closest thing she could get to a Monster) and pack of chewing gum. All told, tax included, it was just at two dollars. The Josta couldn’t have looked more stereotypically 90’s. The label was a bright red offset by smaller, repetitive patterns, almost like flattened, ersatz vaporwave, but with brighter colors. People wouldn’t get an ounce of chill with digital design-making until the mid-2000’s.

“Good weather we’re having lately. For summer.”

“Isn’t it?” Kitty replied, with feeling, elevating her voice just enough to make a pretense of self-confidence. “I just moved up here. I’m enjoying the cool weather, but I do miss the sun.” Meaningless chatter, but it filled the air.

“Then you’ve moved to the wrong place,” the man remarked cheerfully. “Say, why do you have all that junk in your face? You a bull or something? You’d be much prettier without it.”

Kitty froze, completely caught off guard in spite of herself. _Who gives a shit what you think, asshole? I don’t want you attracted to me. That would be creepy, you’re not even a hot grandpa_. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell the man off, but this wasn’t 2018—and she could feel the predators behind her go still, scenting for weakness.

While not nearly everyone here tried to chew off a piece of her ass, on average it was just _more_. It was the sheer, shameless, blunt, frequent, _cumulation_ that was really starting to get old. Everyone thought they were original, everyone thought they were the first, and no one thought they deserved to get snapped at because _oh my why are you so upset I just spoke to you once_ , but they weren’t. And it didn’t just happen when she wore jewelry in everything, she was leered at and got comments when she wore anything. When she thought about it, she realized that even the garden variety nostril piercing hadn’t become more or less socially acceptable until a little after she had graduated high school, in the mid-2000’s. She recalled vaguely that, in the context of the time it was released, the female lead having a nose ring was the sign of her rebellion.

Maybe if those five hadn’t been there she would have given him a piece of her mind.

“I like the way they look,” she managed, with a shrug and a fixed if uncomfortable little brittle smile riveted on her features. “That’s all I care about. I’m not trying to impress anyone.” _Let alone a middle-aged asshole like you_.

The man’s face was guilelessly nonplussed at that statement, or else at her flatly unappreciative tone. He started to say something else but was cut off.

“Only trashy sluts wear junk in their face!”

Kitty turned her head slightly without quite meaning to and flicked her eyes around to look. Her heart began to beat a little faster, nervous, though her face remained stiff as a mask. _Well it’s a good thing I didn’t style my hair to show my ears too, or I’d really be in for it_ , she thought a bit darkly. The one who had thrown that out there was a somewhat bullish young man with dark hair and a mean grin. All of them stood there eagerly, waiting for her reaction.

She turned her face away again and kept smiling. _Just keep smiling, just keep smiling_ …

“Can I get the change, please,” she said to the cashier.

“Sure; here you go,” he said. “You know, you’ll never get a good guy wearing all of that. You’re only going to attract losers and druggies. You know, you should take all of that out—get right with Jesus.”

_Don’t bite his head off don’t bite his head off don’t bite his head off_ …

_I thought I was in Washington state. Well, this is a small town_ …

“Thank you for your input on my appearance, it’s greatly appreciated,” Kitty retorted, gritting her teeth into a rictus grin as she turned to leave, coins clenched in hand.

The man frowned, evidently not stupid enough to miss the passive aggressive Go Fuck Yourself aggressively packed into her tone.

“Have a nice day,” Kitty said, and slipped out the door and back into the chilly, overcast Washingtonian afternoon, headed for the crappy little thirdhand Suzuki Vitara under the awning over the gas pumps, a not-in-the-least environmentally-conscious cryptid from the early 90’s with a horribly loose manual transmission and a tape deck.

She felt her heart lurch when the door jangled open loudly behind her and she heard the sound of several people walking out under the awning.

“Maybe if she didn’t wear all that stuff in her face she could get a decent job. It just looks so _gross_. I bet it’s got snot all over it. _Ew!_ ”

She just walked around the car and opened the door. She recalled someone once gleefully declaring that they would rip piercings out if they got the chance, as if they had personally empowered themselves to rectify all that offended their personal thoughts on life and aesthetics. She also seemed to recall someone actually having a nose ring ripped out in the movie, but it had been years and it had officially taken her _months_ to notice something off about this place. Maybe she had seen it elsewhere.

For all intents and purposes, it had appeared a perfectly normal place until this appearance of the Blue Ribbons.

And, appearance as in like, literally five minutes ago. But was it really her fault? She paid no attention to high school anything wherever she was. High school was boring, and a long time ago. She couldn’t even stand high school AUs in fanfiction. If someone was still reminiscing about high school ten years after graduation, chances were, they hadn’t done anything with their lives since then.

A girl’s voice said: “I bet she’s a dropout. We don’t need this kind of trash moving into our town. Only a stupid loser would think sticking holes in her face is a cool thing to do. Come on, guys. Let’s go to the shake shop.”

The shake shop?

All of it seemed so infantile and cliché that it was almost hard to take seriously, but that was almost by design, wasn’t it? Kitty _knew_ it wasn’t that simple or harmless. The movie had been a cliché high school AU of the Stepford Wives, carried along on a wave of a peculiarly late 90’s grungy self-deprecation, and if she gave them a reaction she ran a serious risk of triggering a violent lapse. She remembered that much, at least.

_Sit down and keep your fucking mouth shut_.

Kitty slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door—and locked them, placing her hands and feet in position at the wheel and pedals, key in the ignition. In the passenger seat was the bag full of exchanged library books. One or two of the Blue Ribbons glanced back at her, triumphant cruelty in their eyes, as they walked off in a pack.

She didn’t let out her breath until they were well away, and a quick glance around her, and into the back seat ( _Rule 31, check, gotta start practicing just in case_ ), confirmed her hopes that they were really gone. Then she finally pushed in the clutch and turned the key. The car rattled to life.

_I’ll have to tell them, won’t I?_

Not a conversation she was looking forward to…

* * *

 

Vicious would never have thought he’d ever miss dust and sand and the red of Mars, but even the deserts of Titan, quicksand, gas and all, were preferable to this endless fucking drizzle and rain. He may have been largely imperious to cold, but this place was damp and chilly in a way that sank into the marrow. It was very green, and closed in, with mountains rising all around him and trees encircling and strangling the house.

Even the towns—cities on Mars had been large, thickly populated points. Here they were all so spread out, with so few people living in them, that it was difficult to get a feel for the fact that there were more people on this planet than there were in his entire solar system.

Titan had been cold. More than once they had slogged through ice flurries, and once fought a battle through four feet of snow that sunk into the layers of sand until it was a nightmarish slush in which bodies sank and rotted.

He’d never been a fan of virtual reality, but he had tried it once or twice in his life. The reality of it was…well, lesser, little, and boring. There wasn’t a fucking thing going on, it was no more interesting than living one day to the next anywhere else. He had nothing to do, nothing to think about—

This place was green, and wet, and if he left town then there was nothing but miles and miles of mountains and more wet green, with nothing there, or large bodies of water. Virtual reality was always paced so that there was always something ahead of you. In reality, there were no boundaries, and at night the moon waxed and waned. Virtual reality lacked strong smells, too; Titan had reeked of blood and decay, and this place of rotting wood and grass, and loped along sleepily.

“She’ll figure it out.”

Vicious paused, his fingers at his cigarette, then took his time lowering his hand and flicking ash to the deck. He let his gaze slide to Shin before he spoke. The porch in front of the house provided effective cover from the rain that had begun to fall again; from the front porch they had a clear view of the driveway, and of the surrounding hills. Behind the house was one of the numerous inlets.

“Are you going to tell her?”

“She notices more than she lets on,” Shin insisted. “If we start sneaking around, she’ll figure out there’s something we don’t want her to know.”

“You think she would rat us out?”

Shin stiffened visibly. “No. I didn’t say that.”

_Then I don’t care what she thinks she knows_. “Don’t concern yourself with her.”

“You’d blame her for a mistake she couldn’t help but make if it came to that!”

Vicious turned his head and looked at him, eyebrow raised by a noticeable fraction.

“Look, I’m just saying, she hasn’t caused any trouble so far,” Shin said. “It might be safer to bring her in on this. At least tell her you have an arrangement with Connor.”

“She isn’t on the inside.”

“We _are_ the inside here, Vicious,” Shin said flatly. “What happens if she gets questioned by cops? She’s always held up her end of the bargain, but what if she says something without meaning to, to the wrong person?”

“If she never hears of anything, she won’t have anything to tell them.”

Shin stared at him, in frustration, shaking but in earnest. “But _sir_ —"

“She does not need to know.”

**Author's Note:**

> I do what I wannnnnnt........


End file.
